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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

Hilarious that Europe, who takes a much more measured approach to free speech has concerns with big tech’s censorship.

When Europe starts to worry about free speech that says something as to how far America has fallen.

> German Chancellor Angela Merkel objected to the decisions, saying on Monday that lawmakers should set the rules governing free speech and not private tech companies.

This is about who gets to make the decisions, not what the decisions are.

Right. That was her point. Free speech is at risk when it’s Zuckerberg making the call.

Does that mean if I call my boss names and he fires me, he is censoring my free speech? Now apply that to Facebook. Facebook isn't censoring free speech and the definition of free speech doesn't mean you can say whatever you want and not have any repercussions.

I'd be much more worried about governments telling me what I can/can't say, rather than private companies not letting me use their platforms to say it.

lawmakers != government

So you'd prefer being silenced by people who you have no control over, rather than a government you elected?

I'm not being silenced. I can setup a website easily or my own Mastodon, or whatever else. If I really wanted to make it more censorship-resistant I'd use IPFS and a decentralized JS framework for real-time communication.

What's Twitter supposed to do? There's likely real legal liability here.

Trump has said whatever he wanted on Twitter, true or not, for the better part of a decade. When that speech translated into violence that killed at least 6 including a police officer, what's a company supposed to do?

Also, Free speech protections don't apply to private platforms. Only a government run equivalent of Twitter would be.

Twitter has zero liability except their profits and an anti-trust investigation which I’m sure the new president will be a lot less likely to pursue at this point.

And did you just call out 6 deaths which include a guy who tased himself, a cop who died of a random stroke and a woman shot in the throat for being there? Come on.

And yes, the 1st amendment restricts the govt but it’s hypocritical as hell for a company to espouse it’s commitment to free speech all the while censoring undesirable opinions.

> Twitter has zero liability except their profits and an anti-trust investigation which I’m sure the new president will be a lot less likely to pursue at this point.

I'm not sure I agree

> And did you just call out 6 deaths which include a guy who tased himself, a cop who died of a random stroke and a woman shot in the throat for being there? Come on.

I also left out the 25 injured officers

> And yes, the 1st amendment restricts the govt but it’s hypocritical as hell for a company to espouse it’s commitment to free speech all the while censoring undesirable opinions.

The opinions were 100% fine until the platform was used as a way to rally supporters to violence. Twitter has gone out if it's way to carve out harassment exemptions for the President who has used the platform for everything from outright lies to falsely accusing people of murder because they spoke out against him.

This was a case of someone using Twitter in a way that would lead to any of us being banned years ago. Nobody spoke up when someone I know got banned from Twitter for retweeting a joke about Antifa planning to launch an attack on small business owners.

Wait — there's a very important question here — why should Twitter face prosecution if news networks that aired hours of uncut Trump speeches do not? Should every organization that has published or platformed possibly violence-inciting speech from Trump (without heavy editorialization) be on the hook as well? Where does it end?

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